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The coyote spotted earlier this week on a grassy field on the Peninsula just a few feet from a children’s playground gave a scare to some of the students’ parents. But it was certainly not the first wild animal to make a cameo appearance on that big stage known as the Bay Area.

This time, the sighting was at John Muir Elementary School in San Bruno. But wild animals have long wandered in from the region’s rural areas and open spaces to make video-worthy appearances in backyards and front porches from Morgan Hill to Sebastopol.

Often there’s a security camera or someone with an iPhone to show the world that it really happened.

We’ll start with this one, posted on YouTube by “Ringelrun” back in early 2017:

A video showing some coyotes, also spotted near San Bruno, was posted on YouTube back in 2016; Oscar Porter captured the pups roughhousing in a meadow below Sweeney Ridge. In other words, same ‘hood, different players.

Wild animals, of course, usually are drawn into established residential areas in search of prey. This 2014 video was posted by the Felidae Conservation Fund, a global nonprofit that works to save wildcat habitats. It shows a mountain lion in South San Francisco digging into an early Thanksgiving feast.

Speaking of Thanksgiving, it was in November 2017 that Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff shared a video of a mountain lion he says was lurking outside his San Francisco home.

A YouTube user in 2016 posted what they said was a mountain lion that had shown up on the doorstep of their Santa Cruz home. The user described the animal as “a juvenile male named 77-M. Its range seems to be in the area between Scotts Valley and Santa Cruz along California highway 17.”

This video, posted by Tristan Morrow in 2012, shows what appears to be a bobcat wandering through Natural Bridges State Park in Santa Cruz.

And in the “a-face-only-a-mother-could-love department,” we have the occasional Bay Area sighting of a wild boar …

Meanwhile, as some Bay Area residents film and post images of their sharp-clawed and fanged night visitors, others trade online stories — and warnings — about running into a mountain lion or wild boar in the foothills without the luxury of having a house to duck back into. When a user on Bike Forums asked “Mountain Lions a concern around dublin/pleasanton/castro valley at night?” the advice came pouring in.

“I’ve been starting my rides early morning due to the recent heat wave,” the user wrote. “Quick google search has shown rare mountain lion attacks and sightings in this area … around Dublin, Castro Valley, and Pleasanton. And in one of these articles, it says mountain lions are most active at dusk, night, and the early morning. What do you guys think … cause for concern….or just paranoia?”

One responder wrote: “Any chance of getting injured usually causes a mountain lion to break off an attack. Yes, they will attack from the front, regardless of what people might tell you. An archery hunter got one through the mouth as it was sneaking up on his side … Any sharp object poked in it’s ribs should usually make the attack stop, as well as pepper spray. Other animals in the area looking to take down a deer could be coyotes, bobcats, or even people’s dogs running loose.”

Patrick May is an award-winning writer for the Bay Area News Group working with the business desk as a general assignment reporter. Over his 34 years in daily newspapers, he has traveled overseas and around the nation, covering wars and natural disasters, writing both breaking news stories and human-interest features. He has won numerous national and regional writing awards during his years as a reporter, 17 of them spent at the Miami Herald.

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